I am a great and long-standing fan of the excellent epic; it is one of the most original concepts to hit fantasy fiction in quite a while.

This product, however, falls badly short in depicting it. You get 224 pages which are print-hostile, with color borders on every page, colored backgrounds for tables, and far too much art, much of it second-rate. Less art would save a lot of printer ink, as these are big pieces.

By page count about 12% of this product is the setting; the rest is (besides art) a very clunky, dated d6 game system. You get a grand map of Westros, spanning two pages, which is decent quality, but there is no indication of scale, so its use to a GM is questionable. It, too is in color, which means printer unfriendly, and likely would not print well set in B&W. No smaller maps of any sort are included.

Unless your players are fans of the core works, they will not get much of the flavor. Setting issues which make the books so interesting (the winters, maester’s chains, the stirring of magic, etc) are hardly touched upon. The writers have managed to take a truly great setting and reduce it to the extremely vague.